26.7.03

24.7.03

from the author of Seabiscuit:

"...When I opened my eyes on the morning of the fourth day, I had a black feeling. I couldn't get up.

For as long as two months at a time, I couldn't get down the stairs. Bathing became nearly impossible. Once a week or so, I sat on the edge of the tub and rubbed a washcloth over myself. The smallest exertion plunged me into a 'crash.' First, my legs would weaken and I'd lose the strength to stand. Then I wouldn't be able to sit up. My arms would go next, and I'd he unable to lift them. I couldn't roll over. Soon, I would lose the strength to speak. Only my eyes were capable of movement. At the bottom of each breath, I would wonder if I'd be able to draw the next one..."

Laura Hillenbrand's riveting account of years of frustration and illness with the misdiagnosed and little-understood myalgic encephalomyelitis at the M.E. site

"The Ainu People" introduces supernatural abilities ueinkar (clairvoyance or second sight) and tus (phychomancy) of some Ainu people. The book reports on an ikoinkar who had the abilities of tus and ueinkar as well as her skilled midwifery, from interviews and recorded information. The midwifery basically using her fingers and foot (arbitrarily selected) was equivalent, or even superior to present obstetric treatment in hospitals in that, at the very beginning of a baby's life, she tried to find abnormality in the baby's backbone and, if she found it, fixed the trouble on the spot. She told the sex of unborn baby with 100% of accuracy by examination touch or her ueinkar.

21.7.03

20.7.03

...On a street in Vienna, there were four
bakers making a precarious existence. There wasn't
enough demand for four bakers on that street. The first
baker pondered this as the sun went down. When the sun
came up, he had a sign in his window: the best baked
goods in Vienna. Soon he was doing a bit more business
than the others. The second baker thought and thought.
The next morning there was a bigger sign in his
window: the best baked goods in Austria. The third guy
said: these two guys are eating my lunch. His was a bigger
sign. It said: best baked goods in Europe. His business
picked up. The fourth guy made a really big sign: "best
baked goods on this street...

Lawrence is one of our true prophets, not only in his "madness for the unknown" and in his explicit warning—

If we do not rapidly open all the doors of consciousness
and freshen the putrid little space in which we are cribbed
the sky-blue walls of our unventilated heaven
will be bright red with blood.

("Nemesis," from Pansies)

—but in his lifelong development of a technique, a fictional and poetic way in which the prophetic voice can be given formal expression. It is a technique that refuses to study itself closely, that refuses to hint at its position in any vast cultural tradition—unlike that of Eliot, for instance!—and that even refuses, most unforgivably to the serious-minded, to take itself seriously.